


In the Days When I was Dear to You (Donec gratis eram tibi)

by Auntarctica



Series: Opera Omnia [5]
Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: Angst, Demoncest, Eventual Happy Ending, Grief/Mourning, M/M, bittersweetness, mentions of past Dante/Vergil, mid-canon interludes, post DMC 4, pre-DMC V, self-indulgence, uncertain uncling
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:09:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27573595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Auntarctica/pseuds/Auntarctica
Relationships: Dante/Vergil (Devil May Cry)
Series: Opera Omnia [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1305152
Comments: 12
Kudos: 84





	1. Luctus

lūctus   
masculine noun (genitive lūctūs); fourth declension  
1\. grief, sorrow, mourning  
2\. lamentation

Nero splits before dawn, and that seems about right.

In fact, it seems almost poetic, given the scent on my sheets. It goes with absence, with leaving, like gin goes with tonic. And like gin, it never lingers long enough. 

I groan and roll under, drag the covers over my head; bury my face and let it permeate me. Breathe you in, take you deep inside me the only way I can. It’s bittersweet as it ever was. _Feels like old times._

I’m sure he feels weird about it, in hindsight; that he woke up in a strange bed with an emotional hangover, not sure what to think about himself, or our little platonic slumber party. Probably weirder than he’d feel if we’d actually screwed. That, at least, you can assign to some kind of clear and obvious motive. Devils, and lust, and needs must. 

I don’t expect to see him for a while.

But he’s back a few days later, your fucking kid, looking like you every other second. Never knowing when to quit.

“There’s a job, over in the Lakeshore District. Nothing I can’t handle, but plenty of action for both of us.” He lifts that pugnacious jaw at me. “You should come.”

“I should come,” I repeat, eyeing him as I sit behind my desk, tilted back in my chair and drinking my late afternoon V-8 and vodka from a pint glass. I used to garnish it with green beans and pickled asparagus, for added nutrition. Lately I’ve just been chasing it with a handful of olives. In a martini.

His gregarious features draw into a scowl, quick as the sun slips behind a cloud. “Don’t be a dick, Dante.”

“Pipe down, Scrappy-Doo. I said all of three words, and they were yours to begin with.”

He sighs, lip twisting. “Fine. I could use the backup. Happy?”

I slug the rest of the glass with an affable shrug. “That was all you had to say.”

I’m down to kill some demons this evening. It beats sitting on the couch staring up at the tin-tile ceiling, dulling my mind’s sorrowful roar with a magnum of whiskey in one fist and my cock in the other. 

_Or does it?_ For a moment I’m not actually sure. That second thing is sounding pretty good, come to think of it, but hey—a promise is a promise.

I set down the dregs with a resounding clunk and leave it on the desk, figuring I’ll clean up later. I’ve been figuring on that for a while. The wine bottles adorning every horizontal surface are like the brooms in _The Sorcerer’s Apprentice_ at this point. I swear they multiply while I’m not looking.

Now and then I toy with the hypothetical of tidying up, but it never seems like a good time, and every now and then Lady’s around and at some point she takes care of it. Neither of us says anything about it. No point in making it awkward. If anyone knows why they’re here, it’s her. She was there when it happened, after all.

At least the first time.

The thing about a really good hard knockdown soul-crushing tragedy is that it’s a chronic condition. At first it cripples you. You really hope it'll kill you, but it politely fucking doesn’t, so you just learn to live with it. Hide the limp with a swagger. Grit your teeth and sell it as a grin.

Nobody’s buying it, but then, you don’t need them to. You just need them to leave it alone.

“Van’s outside,” says Nero, hooking a thumb at the door. “I’ll just…wait for you, if you want to get ready.”

“No need, kid.” There was a time, not too long ago, when getting ready for a mission would take at least an hour. Clambering into one of those stylish, strappy, chappy ensembles was a time-consuming undertaking, and I could easily spend thirty minutes on my hair alone. _Who were you kidding? Who were you trying to impress, anyway?_

_Who were you hoping to meet?_

Now I just rub a hand over my face, load up my weapons and follow him outside.

“I’m driving,” Nero says, preemptively.

I hold up my hands with a snort. “Whatever you say, chief. It’s your rig. I prefer riding shotgun anyhow.”

_Little control freak. Wonder where you get that._

I can’t help the thought, but I wince inwardly. As always, it comes at a price.

We slam the doors and settle in. He fires the engine up, diligently checks his blind spot like a responsible citizen, and puts his turn signal on. I watch his overly-expressive eyebrows angle in the rearview mirror as he swerves out from the curb, onto the road, and we’re on our way.

I lean back in the seat and let my arm hang out the window where I can slap my palm against the door. The sun is warm, and the breeze is nice against my skin.

“Thanks, kid,” I say after a moment, letting the wind drift through my fingers. “Feels good to get out.”

“Sure thing.” He glances at me and ventures a faint, hesitant upward bro-nod. “Thanks for helping me out.”

It’s a nice uncle-nephew moment, even if the kid doesn’t know it. But that’s okay; I’ll appreciate it for both of us. He reaches down and turns on the music. Hell yes, I think, the only thing missing is some good ass-kicking—

What comes out of the speakers isn’t quite what I’m expecting at first, but even ass-kicking songs have mellow moments, sometimes, for contrast, to make you really appreciate the ass-kicking when it finally arrives. So I’m waiting for that to come in with the chorus, and meanwhile the fresh air is nice and the sun on my arm and the side of my face is nice and any moment now…

_You grieve like a freeway tree, old and grey, no love in your leaves_

The chorus comes, but it’s more of a punch in the gut than a kick in the ass.

“What the fuck is this shit?” I say abruptly.

Nero shoots me a narrow glance, so familiar I get gut-punched a second time. Lately I feel like I’m spending my whole life doubled over. “Van’s mine, so we’re listening to my music. In case you forgot, Dante, this is a franchise.”

I make a face, glancing back at the jukebox. “How do you get pumped up listening to this indie white-belt nonsense? You gonna kill some demons while gazing at your shoes? You gonna mope ’em to death?”

“It helps me focus. Unlike some people, I like to be calm when I go into a fight. Cool. Centered. Not everyone’s a rodeo clown.”

I laugh, incredulous. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Forget centered. This shit’ll put you in a coma.”

He gives me a glower. “Better than that fuckin’ flyover rock you listen to. ‘Feel free to dieeeee when you’ve had enouuuuuuugh,’” he mimics, in a guttural, overblown growl. He shifts with punctuational vengeance and his driving gets a little worse.

“Kid, that was a phase, all right? I was nineteen, for fuck’s sake. Everyone goes through phases. Live long enough, you’ll find out. Shit, for your sake, I hope this is one. And if you must know, I’m more feeling classic heavy metal these days. Maybe some stoner rock. So what? At least I’m not listening to dumb songs about sad trees, _all alone forever with the world always rushing at them in a concrete prison they can’t escape_.”

I don’t mean to get quite so bent up over it, but then the words are out in the open, hanging there like neon, just the way I said them. And words are like sparrows, as my brother once told me in his wounded, wintry way. _Once said, Dante, they can’t be caught again._

Nero pauses, then, and something subtle invades his gaze. I see it sidelong, sliding into his expression. His eyes flick toward me, and he makes a decision. He reaches out and hits a button, switching records. I hear new vinyl drop as the needle sends up a fresh white hiss.

“There, you fuckin’ baby. No more sad tree song. If you don’t like it, feel free to fuckin’ walk. I’ll meet you there.”

The new song kicks even less ass, if possible. At least the sad tree song had a good beat, even if it was weak. This song has guitars but they’re being emotionally abused, forced to play some drifting, dreamy wash of marshmallowy ennui. _What’s an average song length anyway? It’s gotta be like four minutes max, right?_ This is what I tell myself, even though I have an uneasy suspicion indie songs are probably longer. I settle in to endure it, but after a moment I’m surprised to realize I know the melody—it’s slowed down and dragged out nearly to the point of wrist-slitting, but recognizable nonetheless.

_If you gonna scream, scream with me_  
_Moments like this they never last_  
_When new creatures rape your face, hybrids opens up the door_

“Holy shit, is this a _Misfits cover_? No, wait, I’m wrong. This is better classified as an actual war crime.”

“It’s Helvetia,” said Nero, through a smirk. “And if you can’t recognize a pitch-perfect stylistic homage to the Velvet Underground, maybe you don’t know as much about music as you think, Dante.”

“They’re named after a font?”

“No, that’s—you know what, never mind. Fuck it. Next.”

“What did Glenn Danzig ever do to you?”

Nero makes a big dramatic show of hitting the button again.

“Not enough, clearly,” I add in a mumble.

The next song starts off with a good beat, but also synthesizer, and that does not bode well. I suppress a groan.

_It doesn't hurt me, do you wanna feel how it feels?_  
_Do you want to know, know that it doesn't hurt me_  
_Do you wanna hear about the deal I'm making?_  
_You…It's you and me_  
_And if I only could, I'd make a deal with God_  
_And I'd get him to swap our places_  
_Be running up that road, be running up that hill_  
_Be running up that building…_

“Next.” Suddenly I feel something, and now is not the time to feel things.

This time Nero looks incredulous, appalled, agog. I gotta admit, it’s cute on him. “It’s Kate Bush, you—

_Barbarian._

—clueless asshole. She’s a fucking musical legend! What’s wrong with you, anyway? This song is a straight-up banger.”

“Come on kid, you can’t be my n—” I realize my near-catastrophic fuck-up, like a drunken stumble, and right myself, “—avigator and dig wuss rock like this.”

Nero snorts. “Yeah? If the regular navigator was here, we’d all be stuck listening to classic rock. _Grandpa rock_ , Dante.” He points at me. “You should be more fucking grateful.”

“Come on. Third time’s the charm.”

“Fine. Pearls, meet fucking swine.”

_Save up all the days_  
_A routine malaise_  
_Just like yesterday_  
_I told you I would stay_

“No. Is this Kids’ Bop? Pass. Hard pass.”

He rolls his eyes and skips to the next song.

_Brother, where have you gone?_  
_So serious, you ever come_  
_Playin' martyr and executioner_  
_In the name of your absent father_  
_Or so you claim_

That one’s even worse, but so breathtakingly, excruciatingly on-the-nose I’m honestly stunned enough that I let it go.

He reads my silence, somehow, and curses under his breath, hitting the switch again. This time what blooms from the speakers is a pretty good bop; guitar-heavy, distorted—sorta rollicking, all told.

“What’s this band called?”

“Tropical Fuck Storm,” he mutters.

“I can work with this.”

“So glad to hear it,” he says, with every inch of your dry contempt but without your cool, deadpan inflection; he’s a more animated animal when he’s sarcastic. More like me.

“What else you got?”

The sigh that comes out of him is all yours, and I secretly savor it. I realize that I sometimes harass him just to hear it. He sullenly punches the button multiple times with dutiful resentment, scanning through his catalogue. Songs blip into being and are summarily shit-canned until he hits upon one he deems worthy of my judgement.

This time it’s jangly post-punk guitars—a simple, catchy melody and a driving rhythm. 

_If you show up in my room with no clothes on, it’s on._

“Oh yeah, I like this.”

“Yeah, well, it’s the dumbest thing on there, so.”

_He’s a good kid. So were you, when I wasn’t driving you crazy._

In the secret pits of my deepest misgivings, there’s a bleak, self-loathing suspicion that on that fatal day at Temen-Ni-Gru you weren’t falling toward our father’s homeland so much as falling away from me. That it wasn’t some misguided, rose-tinted desire, but a nihilist impulse, a snap decision made on the spur of the moment, one I drove you to with my relentless need—for your attention, your approval, your acknowledgment. Your ever-elusive affection. That you only wanted to be alone, whether you lived or died—to at last grasp the solitude I could never bring myself to let you have. I used to chase you into your room, until one day I chased you right off the edge of the world.

 _You’ll drive Nero off a cliff too._ Your ripped-silk voice is in my head, clear as day.

For a moment I feel an ache so acute I can hardly breathe. It’s worse than every time Yamato ran me through combined. 

Then I hear your voice again, calm and wry and cat’s-tongue rough, somehow twice as real as before.

 _I would never say that_. 

I know. I know.

_You can put words in my mouth—_

I do.

_—but don’t use me to_

_Punch myself in the face, yeah, I know._

_I would say self-flagellate._

_Sorry, Verge, but I’ll definitely be using you to self-flagellate later tonight._

_Classy as usual._

_You like it._

_So what if I do?_

_Just sayin._

_And I like that one song._

_Yeah, you would._

_You know which one._

_Yeah, I know which one._

_You like it too._

_Yeah._

“Hey Nero.”

“What now?” He sounds resigned, if peevish.

“Back up to that Kate person.”

He gives me a weird look, but does it. We listen in silence for a moment, while he drives and I stare out the window, feeling my features twitch, only willing to show my face to the street, to the fleeting glimpses of indifferent strangers, passersby who can’t possibly read it.

_You don't wanna hurt me_  
_But see how deep the bullet lies_  
_Unaware I'm tearing you asunder_  
_Oh, there is thunder in our hearts_  
_Is there so much hate for the ones we love?_  
_Oh, tell me we both matter don't we?_  
_You…it's you and me_  
_It's you and me, you won't be unhappy_

You talk a lot, in my head. I like to think I’ve got your voice down pretty good, from memory. But I’d give anything to hear it again, even if it only proves how wrong I’ve been. How much I’ve missed. As if I don’t already know.

_If you like song lyrics so much, you should try books._

Oh brother, if you only knew.

I read now, because you can’t. I read to be close to you, somehow, or at least to something you loved. 

All of my books are highlighted, margin-noted, underlined. It helps me. You’d hate it. But don’t worry—I can’t bring myself to write in your books, the ones I salvaged from your things. They’re artifacts of better days and must remain untouched. 

I read everything, now. Ovid and Horace and the Stoics, for fuck’s sake. Secondhand paperbacks. Smithsonian magazine. Dry old novels and overrated, critically-acclaimed new ones. Latin and demonese. I read whatever I think you’d have liked. Hell, I read things I think you’d have hated, just so I can imagine your withering criticism. 

I read your namesake, voraciously, and pay particular attention to his ancient words. Strangely, even though he mostly talks about hell and ambition, there’s a lot to comfort me there.

Some of it puts me right to sleep and that’s fine too. Alcohol’s not always enough, with half a devil’s constitution, and nothing’s worse than the places my mind goes in my insomnia. It lingers over all my mistakes and regrets. It replays your fall again and again. It revisits the moment that amulet dropped to the ground and I was brutalized forever by two truths: that you’d never been gone, and that now I’d lost you forever.

In my darkest hours, I wonder how long my existence without you will be.

Am I immortal, at this point? I can probably be killed, but not easily. Our father lived for hundreds of years, and died long before his time. Even with our human side, I’m likely looking at many consecutive life sentences.

Can nature kill me? Will it? Can I kill myself if it all gets to be too much, if hundreds of years without you start to weigh on me like accumulating chains and dismantle my mind, pulling me apart? If I can’t take the seasons passing, carrying me farther and farther from the time when you existed with each unfeeling turn of the wheel?

Or worse yet, what if the centuries wear you away? What if a moving picture stills to a painting, which dulls in the never-ending beating of the sun, degrades and then fades to a sketch? What if I start to forget you, in everything you were? 

Not your face; I carry that with me, at least a facsimile. 

What I’m afraid of is being unable to recall the wry, sueded menace of your singular voice, your peculiar expressions and mannerisms, your sly, elusive smile, the geography of your body, your particular scent.

These thoughts terrify me more than any demon. More than any apocalypse—and I’ve faced a few. 

I don’t fear the end, brother. I fear eternity.

Even now, I look at your son. He’s amazing. Just a great kid. So much like you, so much like me, and yet still somehow his own guy. I look at him and I feel this swell of avuncular love and I think…

Could Nero kill me? Is he strong enough? If he’s not now, will he be strong enough some day? If I made that request of your son—our heir, our flesh and blood, would he do it?

Could I die like you did? At the hand of someone like me? 

And if not, _if not_ …

Could it be that you’re not really dead? 

Or that you could be found somehow, revived. Forged again; made whole, like the Yamato?

This is what keeps me dragging myself upright in the morning, this is what keeps me going, brother.

Avuncular. Ha. Didn’t think I knew that word, did you.  
  
Yeah. I read now, douchebag.


	2. Epigones

epigone ĕp′ĭ-gōn″

n. A second-rate imitator or follower, especially of an artist or a philosopher.  
n. One born after; a successor or heir.  
n. Same as epigonium.

In spite of the indie wuss-rock playlist, I have to admit killing things goes pretty well. 

I credit this to me, of course, and the constant stream of heavy metal that plays in my head, scoring my daily life, drowning out your silvery drawl when it’s inconvenient for me to be distracted by your phantom presence, half-crippled by your memory.

We get back to the shop, but I have no plans to talk it. I don’t want to do anything to prolong this job and turn it into a tea party or a social call. You’re on my mind tonight, worse than ever, and not even the screaming guitars and virtuosic vocal tessitura of Mercyful Fate’s “Gypsy” at top mental volume is enough to override your seductive stage whisper, or the responsive longing in my stupid loins.

Your kid’s a fucking menace. He’s also a mess. Strolling through the front door, grinning through blood and viscera like a toddler who found a mud puddle. You’d side-eye me for letting him inside like this. I enjoy the thought and let it linger. I only realize I’m smiling when Nero smiles back at me.

Emotions are contagious, when they’re real.

So there we are, smiling at each other like a couple of lunatics. I feel some more of that pesky avuncular love. _Beer, Nero?_ I almost say, before realizing that I’d only be screwing myself, and not in the way I’m aiming to.

“That got kinda dicey in places, huh,” he ventures, rolling his head, grabbing the side of his neck to stretch it. Blood is dashed diagnonally across the bridge of his nose in a graphic roostertail that reminds me of New Wave makeup. His pale, jagged hair is tinted rose-pink at the tips from ambient blood mist.

“Not to worry, kid. You had me there, after all.” I pause, sighing, adding reluctantly, “And you were more than up to the job. You’d have handled it fine without me.”

“You think?”

“Yeah.” _Your old man always pulled it out, kid. Even when I thought he was gone for good. Until that last time when I fucked up his act, and these days I’m living solely for the hope he had one last dove up his sleeve. Dum spiro spero and all that Latin jazz._ “Good genes, right?”

Nero snorted. “Who knows?”

“I do,” I say, simply, and give him a finger-gun , and leave it at that. “That’s what you call ‘self-evident’.” 

He leans against the wall, hands in his pockets like he’s not sure what to do with himself. I’m not sure quite what to do with him either. I watch the blue neon lines pulse, serpentine, twining through his striated forearm as it ebbs down from trigger.

_You shouldn’t have given away my sword. What’s wrong with you?_

_I know. I don’t know._

_What if I come back? What if I show up some day with a quiche?_

_That quiche come with an apology?_

_No._

_A kiss?_

_Maybe._

_I’ll take it._

_Say it does. We start making up for lost time. And in the course of catching up, I ask you about my sword. My birthright. Just what are you going to tell me?_

_I don’t know, brother. I really don’t._

_What am I supposed to think of that, Dante? That you just gave away your only keepsake of me?_

_Oh, it’s far from the only one, brother. Believe me._

_Why should I?_

_Because I can’t lie in my own fucking head, Vergil, for fuck’s sake._

_Name one._

_Your books, your globe. My glove._

_…That’s three._

_Never happy, are you?_

_I’d be happier with my sword._

_Well, guess what? You’re in luck, because it’s not gone after all. It’s just stuck in another cute little keepsake that you left me. You just love leaving shit behind for me to find, don’t you?_

_It’s gone. He sucked it in like a vape._

_You don’t know what a vape is._

_I’ll never hold it again. It’s part of this sullen little upstart’s fucking arm now. Forever. Nice work, Dante._

_Hey, this sullen little upstart is your fuck trophy, buddy, not mine. Don’t start with me._

“Kyrie’s not expecting me,” says Nero. “I told her not to wait up. That it would be a late night.”

I glance up, hastily breaking off my thoughts to acknowledge him, and my critical inner Vergil falls silent. 

_I’ll see you in a minute, brother, and you’re gonna be a lot more loving._

But inner you has a point, and I ponder it a lot. The Yamato’s not exactly like a goldfish, where I can just nip down to the corner store for a new one to hand you if you ever come looking. I have an uneasy feeling my inner you’s withering words would pale beside the riot act the real you would read me—much as I hate to admit it, he’s only me, after all. Me, a second-rate Vergil impersonator, imitating an act I saw once, up close and personal, all my life. 

You would castigate me, you would blast me, and I would hang my head and take it. 

What’s a little more blame, when you’re guilty of fratricide? 

Not only that, but mariticide. Yeah, there’s a word for killing your male lover. I ran across it in one of your books late one night while lying on the couch and marinating myself in red wine, one of your drinks of choice. Spent a good few minutes crumpled on the rug after that one.

Might as well own the whole damn thing. I sure as hell deserve it.

“Dante?”

I blink, called out of my casual anguish. “Yeah. Here. I’m listening.”

“I thought maybe I could crash here again. You know, if that’s okay by you.” Nero is gazing at me in willful nonchalance, eyes upcast. They’re luminous and ravenous, like hungry opals. The way yours could be, when you wanted me—and you always wanted me in the end, didn’t you, brother? 

We could never be left alone for long without misbehaving. Hell, I can’t even be trusted alone with your memory. _Speaking of which_ —

“Gonna have to take a rain check, kid. I have plans tonight. How about tomorrow?”

“Plans?” Nero looks around, dubiously. “You’re kidding, right?”

I shrug noncommittally in a very articulate way.

“Yeah, okay. Whatever.” He shakes his head like he’s resigned to my inscrutability, like it’s just the price he has to pay for knowing me. 

_That’s how family is, kid. Congratulations._

At his faintly crestfallen expression, I feel the hard twinge of a long-embedded arrow, lodged dead center in my chest. I know how it feels to be shunted aside for a single-minded desire. Almost without my say-so, I feel my voice drop, and gentle to a conciliatory tone. “I’m not giving you the brush-off, Nero. Tonight’s just…not a good night.”

_How can I say this? Uncle Dante needs some quality time alone with your old man. And Jack Daniels. And Jim Beam. And hey, who could forget the Glen twins: Fiddich and Morangie?_

“It’s fine,” he says, recovering immediately, covering immediately, and I know that juck and shuffle too. Know it all too well.

“Tomorrow, okay? Don’t need demons or any excuses.” I nod at him, hold his gaze with raw sincerity, branding the sentiment into his eyes. _God, they’re so familiar._ “You can just come by.”

“Yeah?” He looks tentatively hopeful and wholly mollified. His barely-breaking smile is a like a little sunbeam.

“Yeah. We’ll make an evening of it, all right? Maybe, I don’t know, rent a movie? Popcorn and everything. And you can crash here. On the couch or…wherever you want.”

We both know what he wants; I won’t make him say it. And if I’m honest, I want it too. 

Tonight there’s just something I need more.

“Yeah. That’d be…all right.”

“Okay, then.” I laugh, a little awkwardly, and spread my hands. “It’s a date.”

“Or something,” says Nero, looking at me askance. Right behind it, always threatening to overtake it, is a smile.

_He doesn’t ask for much._

Somehow, my interior brother’s not content to stay silent and patiently wait for his cue—my unbuttoned pants, my bitten lip and beckoning hand, heading on an expedition to the South Pole in lieu of his.

_Yeah, well, a little goes a long way. Just a little acknowledgment. A little attention. A little affection. You taking notes, asshole?_

_Funny how it takes almost nothing to make him happy._

_Yeah. Hilarious. You just coming to this epiphany now?_

_You don’t know that word._

_Yes I fucking do._

_I know what a vape is._

_No you fucking don’t. Stay in character._

Nero pauses, pulling something out of his pocket on his way out the door. It’s a record single, with a simple white label. 

“Here. You should take this.” He nods toward the far wall. “For your jukebox.”

I stare down at his outstretched hand, utterly taken aback. After a moment I blink back into form. “Nah, kid—I can’t take your record. It’ll…mess up your whole… indie wuss-cake vibe. Plus it’s the only good song on that playlist, so—”

He smirks, quick as a switchblade, but it dissipates easily enough. “Take it. I can grab another one, easy, and…everyone should have a copy of this song, anyway. It’s a classic. Call it thanks for your help today.”

I reach out after a moment and carefully take it, by the edges. There’s no paper slip to guard it, since he took it right out of the van’s stacks. “Thanks,” I say. “That’s really decent of you.”

It occurs to me that if there was one word to describe the kid, that would be it.

“See you tomorrow night.” He hesitates at the door. “Don’t overdo it,” he says, after a moment, with a glance back into the offices where my mismatched flotilla of bottles wait in silence on every surface; an army of ghosts from evenings gone by—expectant, empty, accusatory.

I’m about to wave him off, crack wise; quip dismissively and close the door, but something in his expression stops me. It’s concerned, but not judgmental. Sincere, but not scolding. Pragmatic but not resigned.

“I won’t,” I say, instead. “Scout’s honor.” I was never a Boy Scout, but there’s no way he can know that.

_You were never a Boy Scout._

_Neither were you, dumbass._

_If I had been—_

_You’d have more badges. Don’t I fucking know it._

If you came back, brother, I’d let you be the best at everything, forever. I’d even forgive you for it. Shit, I never even minded. I only ever minded that so many things drew your mind and your eye, and took them away from me.

It’s such a schoolboy promise that I have to chuckle out loud at my own juvenile mind.

“What’s so funny?” Nero says, squinting.

“Just laughing at myself, kid. If you can’t laugh at yourself, what have you got?”

_Nothing._

“Yeah?” he says, with that feral-but-hopeful puppy-dog look. “Why don’t you tell me the joke, so I can laugh at you too.”

I shake my head, wave him off. “It would take too long to explain, and the punchline just ain’t worth it.”

We both miss you, on some visceral level. But he’s blissful in his ignorance; blessed enough that doesn’t even know what he misses. And that makes me sad, Verge—I’m not being sarcastic, it really gets me. But I’m not about to have The Talk™ with your kid. Not about you. I’d give myself away, somehow; I always do. React too much when I hear your name. Get mad, or just weird. Say something only a lover would say. Maybe not the words themselves, or even the sentiment, but something telling I can’t quite strain out of the inflection.

And yeah, sometimes the sentiment.

Too intimate. The anger; too intimate.

Everything too fucking intimate. 

“Then I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess,” Nero says, not looking too shot-down about it.

“Absolutely, kid. With bells on. We’ll bro down. It’ll be great.”

He smiles, and I know all is forgiven. I’m surprised to realize that also reminds me of you.

When he leaves, he closes the door behind him in a perfectly decent way, decisive but polite. The brick walls of my charming old building muffle the city like the clamp of a hand, cocooning the shop from the world outside. Still, I’m near enough to one of the vast steel factory windows to hear the faint echo of the van door closing a few beats later, and the engine revving to life. When I glance out, he’s gone, leaving only a desolate length of curb, spotlit beneath a solitary streetlight.

As I look down at the vinyl 45 in my hands, I don’t hear Kate Bush.

What I hear is a string quartet.

_Oh. You remember._

Oh brother, I remember everything.


End file.
